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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8456044" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Bit late to the party on this one, but I thought it might still be worthwhile to weigh in. Averages can be misleading, however, since it is quite rare for every single roll to be near the average. That's why you often want to simulate a full spread of results, if possible, rather than strictly dealing with the numerical averages.We <a href="https://anydice.com/program/7eab" target="_blank">can use AnyDice</a> to perform this calculation easily. Literally just took the ordinary 4d6-drop-lowest program <a href="https://anydice.com/articles/4d6-drop-lowest/" target="_blank">presented here</a>, modified to keep the top 3 out of 5 rather than the top 3 out of 4. As you can see from the graph version (rather than the table version, which isn't very easy to make comparisons with), the expected results are {16.44, 15.21, 14.14, 13.06, 11.80, 9.93}. If we round these to the closest integer, we get {16, 15, 14, 13, 12, 10}. This is a little bit more than +1 to every stat, as the default 5e array is {15, 14, 13, 12, 10, 8}: a componentwise subtraction gives {1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2} for a total of 8 additional points, though the biggest differences are at the lowest end of the curve (and partially caused by rounding.) The 5e point-buy exactly reproduces the default array.This is fair. (Incidentally, <a href="https://anydice.com/program/25451" target="_blank">adding a 7th roll</a> to the above example gives {16.60, 15.48, 14.53, 13.62, 12.64, 11.45, 9.68}. Meaning that, on average, the low roll you discard is quite likely to be no less than 7, implying that all your other rolls are usually 8+. The statistically average array becomes {17, 15, 15, 14, 13, 11, 10} with the 10 being discarded. Adding a 7th roll to the ordinary 4d6-drop-lowest option instead gives an expected average array of {16, 14, 13, 12, 11, 10, 8}, with that 14 being literally a hair's breadth from rounding up to 15 instead.)</blockquote>

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